An example of why you should use the featured image feature in WordPress

Some social media will look for the featured image if you are posting a link. Not having a featured image will result in a link that is text only in Tumblr.

In WordPress, there might be several ways of doing something. Your theme may also play a role. What I wanted was an image next to the blog posts as shown below

Featured Image Example

One way of accomplishing that is to use the featured image feature of WordPress. The way I did it originally was to put the image in the post above the ‘read more’ and size it as a thumbnail. That gave the same effect as using a featured image. However, that method created problems.

I ran into an issue while posting links to my posts on Tumblr. Posting links to your WordPress Blog articles on Tumblr can drive traffic and has great SEO value. Those links are much more effective for most websites if they contain an image. For example, here is a post to Tumbler linking to an article on my WordPress blog. It has an image

Tumbler example post to a WordPress article with a featured image

However, I ran into a situation where several of my articles that I tried to link to on Tumbler were not showing any images, just some boring text. In the example below, the pool really was a horrid green mess. It would be a perfect post for an image.

Tumbler example post to a WordPress article WITHOUT a featured image

After a bit of checking, I found that the reason that the images were not showing was that some posts did not have a featured image. When I set the featured image, the links to my WordPress articles worked properly in Tumblr

WordPress article without a featured image

WordPress article with a featured image

Summary:

Social Media plays a key role in getting legitimate traffic to your sites. Each Social Media platform handles the way they display linked content that you post. Not using the featured image feature of WordPress will cause issues when posting your content to Tumblr. It might cause issues with other social media platforms as well.